This disclosure relates generally to providing digital content to users of an online system, and more specifically to smooth transition of video playback with page flip action within a digital magazine.
Digital distribution channels disseminate a wide variety of digital content including videos, text, images, audio, links, and interactive media (e.g., games, collaborative content) to users. A user of a digital magazine mobile application can play videos on content pages of a digital magazine, where the digital magazine mobile application generates a page flip animation when the user turns each content page. However, playing back a video on a content page and turning the content page simultaneously in a digital magazine executed on a user device (e.g., a smartphone) require the use of some common hardware resources on the user device, for example, a graphics resource like a graphics processing unit (GPU), by calling Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) interface. The OpenGL is a cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) graphics such as showing a video frame of a video. The OpenGL also enables the user device to render the page flip animation in a digital magazine. However, the graphics resource on some user devices cannot support both operations of rendering video playing back and page flip animation as described above at the same time due to the constraints of the graphics resource. For example, when a user intends to flip a page of a digital magazine with a video being played back on that page, the video content may turn to be invisible (e.g., completely black) upon the page flip action from the user, which degrades the user experience with the digital magazine.